,
he was a mere dinner bell. Hence you will find so many half truths in his
speeches and writings. Nevertheless, let us heartily acknowledge his
transcendant greatness. He would have been more influential if he had less
surpassed his contemporaries, as Fox and Pitt, men of much inferior minds
in all respects.
* * * * *
As a telegraph supposes a correspondent telescope, so a scientific lecture
requires a scientific audience.
_April _9. 1833.
PROSPECT OF MONARCHY OR DEMOCRACY.--THE REFORMED HOUSE OF COMMONS.
I have a deep, though paradoxical, conviction that most of the European
nations are more or less on their way, unconsciously indeed, to pure
monarchy; that is, to a government in which, under circumstances of
complicated and subtle control, the reason of the people shall become
efficient in the apparent will of the king.[1] As it seems to me, the wise
and good in every country will, in all likelihood, become every day more
and more disgusted with the representative form of government, brutalized
as it is, and will be, by the predominance of democracy in England, France,
and Belgium. The statesmen of antiquity, we know, doubted the possibility
of the effective and permanent combination of the three elementary forms of
government; and, perhaps, they had more reason than we have been accustomed
to think.
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